Renovating or Building a Home in Murrayville

The plan says Murrayville was the first community in Langley to grow outside Fort Langley. It started near Paul Murray's farm, pre-empted in 1874, where the New Westminster to Yale Road crossed the trail to Fort Langley. Hotels came in the 1880s, then farmhouses and a church, a school and the first suburban houses, and in the 1920s and 1930s later stores, another church and the community hall. The plan calls Murrayville the administrative and institutional centre of the Township. Langley Memorial Hospital, at 22051 Fraser Highway, sits inside the plan area on the Township's map. So does the Langley Municipal Airport, and Section 104.6 of Zoning Bylaw 2500 applies the federal Langley Airport Zoning Regulations on top of each zone's own height limit.

We read the Township's open parcel data for the plan area on October 28, 2026. The Communities map layer draws the area at 459.8 hectares, smaller than the 550 hectares given in the plan text, and holds 4,028 parcel records, 2,015 of them strata units. Of the 1,744 land parcels in house zones, R-1D is the largest group: 961 lots with a median mapped size of 677 m², half of them between 652 m² and 797 m². Next come R-1E with 374 lots (median 944 m²), R-1B with 159 (median 476 m²), SR-1 with 142 (median 1,231 m²), SR-3 with 78 (median 1,855 m²) and R-1A with 30. Township records place 66 parcels of the area in the Agricultural Land Reserve, 45 of them zoned for the airport, and no house lots. Map sizes are for reference only, so we design from a BC Land Surveyor's plan.

The zones follow the plan's land use map. Land marked Single Family Two has a 650 m² minimum lot, Single Family One 930 m², and Suburban 1,765 m². The plan keeps new driveways and road intersections to a minimum on 48 Avenue, 56 Avenue, 216 Street and 222/224 Streets, and it allows no house lot to take its driveway straight off the Fraser Highway.

Council added the heritage conservation area to the plan with Bylaw 4833 on November 29, 2010. Map 4 of the plan shows its boundary, drawn around Murray's Corner, the five-street intersection at 48 Avenue and 216 Street. In Township records, 144 parcel records carry the Murrayville heritage area flag. Eighty of them are house lots: 35 on 48 Avenue, 21 on Old Yale Road, 10 on 216 Street, and the rest on 48A Avenue, 47B Avenue, 216A Street and two other streets. Their median mapped size is 793 m², and 76 of the 80 have Township sewer and water.

Appendix B of the plan lists 14 scheduled heritage properties, which are legally protected. Among them are Old Yale Road itself, Sharon Presbyterian Church at 21562 Old Yale Road, Porter's General Store at 21611 48 Avenue, the Murrayville Community Hall at 21667 48 Avenue, the Traveller's/Murrayville Hotel at 21628 48 Avenue, and the P.Y. Porter House at 4786 217A Street. The design guidelines name 18 more sites on the Township's Heritage Inventory.

Inside the area, a heritage alteration permit is needed to subdivide, to build a new building, to demolish one, or to add to or change the outside of a building, including its windows, doors, porches and siding. Interior renovations need no heritage permit, and neither do landscaping, repairs that match what is there, or repainting in similar colours. On a house that is not on the schedule, an accessory building or an addition under 50 m² (538 sq ft) can also go ahead without one when it does not face a road and follows the guidelines in similar materials and style.

The guidelines allow zoning variances for heritage projects through a heritage alteration permit or a heritage revitalization agreement, and on a site with such an agreement the plan sets the minimum lot at 464 m². Since April 27, 2026 (Bylaw 6116), up to four homes on a lot in the area must also meet the Township's design guidelines for small-scale multi-unit housing, and where the two sets of guidelines conflict, the Murrayville guidelines win. Township records mark five house lots in the area with a heritage designation, each tied to its own bylaw, and a lot with a heritage designation by bylaw falls outside the multi-unit housing rules.

Setbacks are mandatory in the guidelines: a new building is set back the average of its two neighbours, so it does not stand forward of them. Height should look consistent with the old buildings, and the guidelines note that none was historically taller than two storeys. Roofs should be gabled, hipped or both, and the historic pitch is 25 to 35 degrees. A house on a corner lot is treated as having two front façades.

Materials follow the early wood-frame buildings. New siding should be smooth horizontal wood no wider than 15 cm (6 in), like drop siding or lapped siding, with corner boards and window trim over it; board-and-batten and sawn cedar shingles are also listed. Roofs can be asphalt or duroid shingles that look like weathered cedar. The guidelines advise against vinyl, aluminum and plastic siding, split cedar shakes, unfinished cedar, masonry as the main wall finish and textured stucco. Windows should be inset into the wall in the traditional way, and old wooden windows should not be replaced with metal-frame ones.

A few items are banned on the street side. Skylights and metal chimney flues may not be visible from the front street, and porch stairs need closed risers. Satellite dishes are discouraged where they can be seen from the street, and owners are asked to keep front fences and hedges to 0.76 m (30 in). The guidelines also suggest taking off later vinyl, aluminum or stucco siding to uncover the original wood, since those coverings are usually nailed straight onto it.

The plan also covers land next to the boundary. When land next to the heritage area is rezoned or subdivided, new houses there should follow the form, scale and character of historic Murrayville, and the Township asks for an exterior design control agreement.

R-1D and R-1E share their limits. All buildings together can cover 35% of the lot, or 45% with infill housing, and the house can be 9.0 m tall. On the median R-1D lot of 677 m², 35% is 237 m² of footprint for the house, the garage and any shed or garden suite; on the median R-1E lot of 944 m², it is 330 m². A house of 280 m² or more, garages included, keeps its second storey to 80% of the first.

Township records show sewer and water on 1,717 of the 1,744 house lots, and 1,707 of those are under 4,050 m². That covers two of the tests for up to 4 homes on one lot. The Township checks the rest for each address: inside the Urban Containment Boundary, no heritage designation by bylaw, outside a Transit Oriented Area, and no driveway onto an arterial road. Each such project also needs a form and character development permit unless it is exempt. The plan adds its own charge: a levy of $332 for each new residential lot or unit, toward a pedestrian overpass across the Fraser Highway, collected before final subdivision approval for house lots or before the building permit for multi-family projects. We ask the Township whether it applies to your project.

A river and a creek set limits on some lots. The plan keeps the banks of the Nicomekl River and Murray Creek as conservation areas. Section 105 of Zoning Bylaw 2500 keeps buildings 20 m from Murray Creek's natural boundary and 30 m from the Nicomekl's, and on land below 14 m elevation it puts the floor of living space at least 4 m above them.

For a renovation, the age of the house comes first. The plan put the 1986 population at 1,862, against 11,853 in 2024. For any house built before 1990, the Township says a hazardous materials survey and a WorkSafeBC Notice of Project may be needed. We test before demolition starts inside the house. Our pages on whole-home renovations in Langley and home additions in Langley cover the permit steps, and our page on coach houses and garden suites in Langley covers a second home behind the house.